All Interviews
The Ocean
The Ocean
Posted on Jan 7, 2006
by Anders
The Ocean, this German collective, with its core of 7 and a bunch if outsiders, who also deliveres a bit of this and that to the musical and visual ventures of the band. This is not your ordinary band, as you will find out when you read this interview... Perhaps you have already heard the music and have been taken away by the brutal to beautiful to atmospheric to technical to weird vivid soundscapes from The Ocean, or perhaps caught them live and have been blown away or amazed by that. I caught up with visiualist Nils and mainman, guitarist and percusionist Robin to get a good talk about the band and their music. Quite a ride.
Hi there, how are things in Germany as we speak?
Nils: Pretty good, The Ocean just returned from the holidays and started rehearsing again and working on our live performance for the upcoming shows and the big tour in spring. We haven't been on stage for a while now, so can't wait to hit the road again...
Will you please start off by introducing yourself, tell us what your role in The Ocean is and how you ended up in the band?
Nils: I'm Nils, The Ocean's visual designer. I'm in charge of the videos that usually support our stage appearances. In 2001, I joined the band after Robin, a homie from the small town we grew up in, told me about the concept he had. He needed someone for the optical component and I really liked the idea. I'm into films and photography a lot, I even used to run my own darkroom, and Robin and I shared the same love for people like David Lynch or Andrej Tarkovsky. And when I heard the first demo recordings I was hooked immediately – I said yes and haven't regretted it since. Even though it's hell of a lot of work.
Do you care to explain the idea behind the collective know as The Ocean?
Robin: The idea behind The Ocean is the concept of a highly complex audiovisual media machinery. We're trying to go beyond the limitations that come along with being a "traditional" rock band. What we're out for is the full-body experience. We're trying to create a certain atmosphere on stage, by means of sound, foremost, but also by means of a programmed light-show in dim, cold colors; video-projections and tons of moving bodies throwing around and chasing their instruments, evaporating blood, sweat and adrenaline. We try to make people get lost in our world for the duration of the show, and also whilst listening to our record. That's why there are interludes between songs, we try to link everything, we don't talk in between songs on stage, because we don't want the overall feeling that is connected to and conveyed by the music to stop and begin again, each and every time anew. We want people to get lost, within the music, within themselves.
How did it all start?
Nils: The Ocean has its roots somewhere in early 2000, when our guitarist Robin came to Berlin where he started looking for people in order to form a band to realize his musical vision. He had recorded some songs on his 4-tracker and had a precise idea of where he wanted the whole thing to go. Over the course of the next two years, more than 30 people joined and left the project until a stable line-up of passionate and reliable people was found -- and a proper band name. In summer 2002 we had our first public appearance. The next year we got signed to Make My Day Records and released our first record "Fogdiver" in 2003. It was entirely instrumental. In 2004 we released our sophomore record "Fluxion", which saw the introduction of vocals and big-scale orchestrations including classical instruments such as cellos, flutes and trombones. Now it's 2005 and our third album "Aeolian" was just released by Metal Blade Records.
Who is the core of the band, if there is such?
Nils: There definitely is a core. The core consists of seven fix members who always are there. These are the people you'll always see on stage at our shows. The core is what you could call an expanded rock line-up: guitars, bass, drums, vocals, percussion and visuals. What makes The Ocean a collective is the other people loosely associated to the band, such as cello or violin players, a sound engineer, additional singers, graphic designers and even a juggler. They join us depending on our needs, their availability and logistic feasibility.
Who are the main song-writers?
Nils: All our songs – words and music -- are written by the "creative despot in charge", Robin. We're not a jam-band. A lot of us, including Robin, have played in jam bands and none of these bands ever really got anywhere. The Ocean follows a different approach. Robin composes all the music from scratch by himself: guitars, bass, drums, lyrics and the orchestral stuff. This was the concept from the beginning and one of the reasons why some people didn't stay in the band too long. They weren't used to that approach and didn't want to play in a band that doesn't offer space for realizing their egomaniac desires. It was hard to find musicians that didn't want to place their own solos in every song. But we found them: people who are into the idea of playing composed music rather than jamming around and being in a band with the idea of "the whole" in mind.
The musical is quite a blend of some different elements, how did it end up like that? Where is the inspiration for the music found?
Nils: We've always wanted to transcend the borders of the musical sandbox we grew up in. We don't want to confine ourselves to one particular style, but rather create our own by incorporating elements from more than just one genre. Most of us have a punk, metal, or hardcore background, but over the years we've discovered a huge variety of artists not only from contemporary metal and noise contexts, but from a larger horizon – even including artists that are not even musicians. Film makers such as Lynch or Tarkovsky, poets and writers such as Rimbaud or Lautreamont and surrealist artists like Breton and Dali: even those people have shaped our approach to music. As for what metal/noise/hardcore in the broadest sense is concerned, bands that have really had an impact on us are Unbroken, Groundwork, Absinthe, Coalesce, Converge, Botch, Dillinger Escape Plan, Neurosis, The Melvins, Refused, Meshuggah and more than anything, the mighty BREACH.
Can you pull out 3 bands and 3 songs that have meant a lot to you and for the sound of The Ocean?
Robin: The bands must be Breach, Neurosis and Unbroken. And the songs are 'Tannhäuser/Derivee' by Refused, 'The Saddest Day' by Converge and 'Future Breed Machine' by Meshuggah.
Which elements do you see as the most important ones for a The Ocean song?
Nils: Our songs don't follow a scheme or a recipe, so it's hard to point out three elements that are crucial for each of our songs. Our songs are just too different from each other. Just compare 'Necrobabes.com' and 'Austerity', or 'Dead Serious And Highly Professional' and 'Endusers'. I don't think there's even one element that they all have in common – except for the fact that they all have this certain The Ocean feel to them.
How would you describe your music to one, who never had heard about the band?
Nils: Our music is a bastard of things that usually are thought to exclude each other: it's empathetic but vile, it's technically perfect but highly emotional. Double-bass attacks are combined with electronic soundscapes, calm cello passages meet guitar-dominated outbursts of passion and fury.
How did you end up with the band name The Ocean, what does it symbolize?
Robin: The Ocean is the place where everything begins and ends. The ocean can stand for a peaceful sunset scenery as much as for a stirred-up, man-eating storm-sea, swallowing everything in its path. This is true just as much for our music: there are plenty of peaceful, playful, instrumental passages on our previous records "Fogdiver" and "Fluxion". As for what the present tense is concerned, I guess I'll have to say that the state of the ocean is a category-4 hurricane though... I have a very intimate, personal relationship to the sea, although I have never been living close to the coast. I have spent the most beautiful and the most frightening moments of my life close to the ocean, so it really has a deep meaning for me. I can sit by the ocean for hours and just look at the water, I can't get enough of it... it's an addiction, I guess...
You have just released your first full length album for Metal Blade "Aeolian", how has it so far been received?
Robin: The overall reactions have been outstanding. We got high scores from all over Europe, record of the month in Swedish Close-Up Magazine, 4K in Kerrang, etc... Although some people especially here in Germany don't follow and understand the "direction" we have taken with this new record. I put this in quotation marks because it is not a direction: "Aeolian" shows a face of the band that was always there, and people who have seen us live know that. But still, it's just one face out of several faces we out on. "Fluxion" shows another face, and "Fogdiver" yet another. This is a great challenge to us, to reinvent ourselves with every new album. But that doesn't mean that the old albums are falling from grace with us. We still love our mellow, instrumental "Fogdiver" tracks as much as the violent outbursts on "Aeolian". But some people can't take that, for them "Aeolian" is too much metal or for others "Fogdiver" is too artsy, or whatever. That's cool with us, we're not writing music to please the masses, and it's normal that you lose fans and gain new ones along the way.
How do you feel about the album?
Robin: "Aeolian" is a brutal fucking bastard of a record: there are no embellishments, fewer calm passages than in the past, there's no room to breathe for the listener, it's the full-on assault of the senses: technical yet highly emotional, empathetic yet vile. Song-lengths range between 1.30 and 10 minutes; there are a lot of weird time-signatures and seemingly chaotic arrangements, but the overall picture is really coherent I think... you don't get lost in the record, you'll always get the feeling, although it might take a while to absorb the whole thing and to remember the songs. It's definitely not an easy-listening record... it's was a challenge for us to make this record, and it is a challenge for the listener to receive it. To us it is a very special record, and the one we're most content with, from all the records we've done so far.
What do you expect from it?
Robin: That it fills our pockets as quick as possible so I can buy that Maserati anytime soon... no, seriously: We don't have too many expectations connected to that album, it is in many European territories the first The Ocean album ever released, many people are not yet familiar with us, because our previous records weren't widely available in many territories. I expect that we'll be able to tour now on a regular basis, also in all these "new" countries, and since our album is also being released in the US and in Japan, that we'll be able to tour over there hopefully soon, too. Let's just see what happens.
Which track on it is your favourite and which one does represent The Ocean the best?
Robin: Each one has its own meaning to me and its own special history, so it very hard to pick one. But if I had to, I would probably say... damn, I don't know. I can't pick one. I'll have to pick at least two. The first one would be the opener, 'The City In The Sea'. This song is our tribute to metal, in a way, it comprises a lot of different styles and aspects, all wrapped up in The Ocean-vesture, of course: there is the classical re-de-de-de-de-de-opening, followed by a chaotic fuck-your-brains-out-part, then the mid-tempo hardcore part with these bestial vocals followed by the essential sludge/doom-part, and then the infamous final chapter... the final chapter of this song is among the most intricate and crushing music we've ever written - and strangely enough, it is one of the few arrangements our drummer Torge and me have developed jamming, more or less. We met every day for about 10 days in a row, working on the arrangements. When we played it to the other guys in the band, they were like "fuck off, you crazy bastards!!"... It reminds me a bit of old Confessor - except for the vocals, obviously.
The second one would be 'Inertia'. It's one of my favourite songs ever. There's this almost Wagner-esque part in the middle of the song with all these cellos playing and building up tension and a breathtaking, ever-changing drum-pattern to top it off... it just builds and builds and then it totally explodes when the vocals come back in, before terminating in this agonizing tempo-curve breakdown at the end of the song... I also really dig the contrast at the beginning of the song between Tomas Hallbom's desperate, high vocals and Meta's low-end roars... you can also hear a surf-guitar in the first part of the song if you listen carefully...
What does the album title symbolize and what are your thoughts behind it… And what about the cover artwork, what does it symbolize and what are your thoughts behind it?
Robin: The title "Aeolian" refers to the force of the wind, to all processes of erosion, destruction, and shaping of the face of the earth through the power of winds. Obviously, this is also reflected in the album artwork. The title also has a relation to the title of our previous record, "Fluxion", which refers to all processes of erosion, destruction and shaping of the earth through forces of flowing liquids, especially water. So the album's theme is developed by references to the force of winds. To us, the wind is a symbol for and cause of discomfort. Not anguish or hatred, but plain, beautiful discomfort... the cold breeze that's blowing from the sea when the sun is about to set, the chafing crust of salt between your sun-tanned skin and your shirt, the biting stench of urine in a worn-down, beautifully colored colonial house entry, the pressing heat of a tropical night that doesn't let you sleep, the feeling of wet clothes sticking to your body while wading through flooded streets during heavy monsoon rains... for those are things we are hard-pressed to find in this clean, air-conditioned world of ours.
Let's turn towards the lyrical side of The Ocean, which lyrical themes have you touched on "Aeolian"?
Robin: The overall theme of the lyrics on the album is some of the nasty, hostile excrescences of a society based on commodities, wage-work, material success, individuality... and, increasingly, control. One of these implications is the necessity of leading outlined lives for the sake of career and affluence... we go to kindergarten, to school, to university, to work, and by the time we get out of the sweep through the institutions we're old and tired. We never actually pause and live life in the present tense, in a rewarding way, and a lot of times we don't even seem to know what is rewarding to us. Hence we are content with almost everything -- working shitty jobs doing things we don't enjoy in order to earn money to buy things we don't need.
Who is writing the lyrics and where is the inspiration for them found?
Robin: Inspiration is found almost everywhere, for the lyrics often deal with our every-day reception of the way this world is organized. But we also draw a great deal upon influences from other writers. Let me give you one example: on "Aeolian" there's a song called 'Une Saison En Enfer'. This is the title of a book by Rimbaud, a collection of poems and prose, and that title, as well as that book in general, perfectly represent what that song is about. I'm really into Rimbaud and the whole story of him and Verlaine, I'm actually even more interested in his life than in his artistic, poetic achievements, though they are undeniable. Rimbaud to me reflects an individual with a heart so passionate that in the end it turned out to be his tragic flaw. He lost his life at the age of 37 after completely turning his back on and even ridiculing his own artistic achievements and becoming a vagabond of sorts in Ethiopia. Before that, he was working for the Dutch army, deserted, fled, got banished, lived in Cyprus, Norway and Africa... though his days on earth were few, he lived life to the fullest and experienced more than most other people will in 60 or 70 years of life on earth. That was very inspirational for me and it also represents the spirit of THE OCEAN.
Do you have a message to tell with your lyrics and how important are the lyrics compared to the music?
Robin: The lyrics are indeed important, just like every instrument on this record, they're a contribution to the whole. What lyrics can do is open up entirely new horizons for someone who is really "investigating" a record. If you like the music, you might discover whole new aspects of it by reading the lyrics. They have the potential to make you appreciate it in a much deeper, all-encompassing way. But in a lot of cases they have the opposite effect, which particularly is the case with overtly political lyrics. Preachy, moralist lyrics might ruin the whole picture – there's moments when you think you'd better not have opened the booklet. Good political lyrics that don't come off as pretentious or cliché are very rare, almost non-existent. His Hero Is Gone is a positive example. It just seems to be an eternal contradiction of sorts, since politics address people on a rational level, whereas music and art address people on an emotional level. So if you try to mix that, either one of the two aspects will end up suffering. That's why we stick to a very personal, abstract approach, although there are political statements in almost every song. But they kind of need to be discovered, they are not so much "in your face"... people who make the effort to read the lyrics will find a lot in them – it's up to you if you call that a message or not.
You have been marketed as one of the bright hopes for the future of extreme metal, how do you feel about that?
Robin: That's nice to hear, although the term "hope" suggests some sort of incertitude... to put it like Belgium's No. 1 rock magazine, Rock Sound: "THE OCEAN ARE the future". That's better...
Is the above a statement that the band is capable of lifting?
Robin: Absolutely! Just give us 3 years and we'll have Slayer open up for us.
The band has been quite active in the past, is the pace you so far have had, a pace you'll keep up, or do you intend to slow a bit down?
Robin: Not really. Well, 2006 might be the first year in our band-history that won't see the release of a new The Ocean album, but a new record is already in the making. I'm spending many nights a week down in the catacombs of oceanland these days, writing and programming new material. I'm really excited to record this stuff, but the near future will see us tour a lot and I'm afraid we won't be able to start rehearsing the new material before fall 2006. Next time we go into the studio, we wanna take a different approach: we want to be able to play all the songs perfectly before we record them. That was not the case with the "Fluxion / Aeolian" recording session. But generally, the pace is gonna be even more up in the future. Hopefully we'll be able to tour many months a year in the coming years. We're trying to do this as full-time as possible.
How do you look upon the future of The Ocean?
Robin: Lots of touring. Lots of flying wood and broken noses. Lots of absinthe... and a new, devastating stage performance. We're gonna be embarking on a big European tour early next year (2006). The tour will begin on March 15th in Berlin and conclude on April 18th in Berlin, again. It will take us to Scandinavia for the first time, but also to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Benelux -- and France! We'll be down there in early April, supposedly. April 9th in Paris at Le Batofar!
Will you share your 5 all time favourite albums with our readers?
Nils: The musical preferences in the band are too diverse to do this for the band as a whole (actually there's a lot of artists/records that we're having heavy fights about), but I can list my own top five, which is nevertheless gonna include favorites shared by many others in the band. (In no particular order)
Refused – The Shape Of Punk To Come
Shellac – At Action Park
Damnation A.D. - No more Dreams Of Happy Ending
Breach – Venom
Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy
Robin:
Breach - Venom
Neurosis - Times Of Grace
Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve / Chaosphere
Converge - Petitioning The Empty Sky
Unbroken - Life. Love. Regret
Thanks a lot for answering my questions, if you have anything to add feel free to add it now!
Nils: If you liked "Aeolian", check out its symphonic twin, "Fluxion". It'll open up a slightly different view onto The Ocean, but you'll sure love it. For those who haven't bought "Aeolian" yet, there's a 3LP box set featuring both "Aeolian" and "Fluxion". And then there's two limited 7"s on Futhermocker Records and Garden Of Exile – the latter one is a split with Burst, another awesome band we highly recommend checking out. Check our website for details on all this. Thanks for the interview!
Nils: Pretty good, The Ocean just returned from the holidays and started rehearsing again and working on our live performance for the upcoming shows and the big tour in spring. We haven't been on stage for a while now, so can't wait to hit the road again...
Will you please start off by introducing yourself, tell us what your role in The Ocean is and how you ended up in the band?
Nils: I'm Nils, The Ocean's visual designer. I'm in charge of the videos that usually support our stage appearances. In 2001, I joined the band after Robin, a homie from the small town we grew up in, told me about the concept he had. He needed someone for the optical component and I really liked the idea. I'm into films and photography a lot, I even used to run my own darkroom, and Robin and I shared the same love for people like David Lynch or Andrej Tarkovsky. And when I heard the first demo recordings I was hooked immediately – I said yes and haven't regretted it since. Even though it's hell of a lot of work.
Do you care to explain the idea behind the collective know as The Ocean?
Robin: The idea behind The Ocean is the concept of a highly complex audiovisual media machinery. We're trying to go beyond the limitations that come along with being a "traditional" rock band. What we're out for is the full-body experience. We're trying to create a certain atmosphere on stage, by means of sound, foremost, but also by means of a programmed light-show in dim, cold colors; video-projections and tons of moving bodies throwing around and chasing their instruments, evaporating blood, sweat and adrenaline. We try to make people get lost in our world for the duration of the show, and also whilst listening to our record. That's why there are interludes between songs, we try to link everything, we don't talk in between songs on stage, because we don't want the overall feeling that is connected to and conveyed by the music to stop and begin again, each and every time anew. We want people to get lost, within the music, within themselves.
How did it all start?
Nils: The Ocean has its roots somewhere in early 2000, when our guitarist Robin came to Berlin where he started looking for people in order to form a band to realize his musical vision. He had recorded some songs on his 4-tracker and had a precise idea of where he wanted the whole thing to go. Over the course of the next two years, more than 30 people joined and left the project until a stable line-up of passionate and reliable people was found -- and a proper band name. In summer 2002 we had our first public appearance. The next year we got signed to Make My Day Records and released our first record "Fogdiver" in 2003. It was entirely instrumental. In 2004 we released our sophomore record "Fluxion", which saw the introduction of vocals and big-scale orchestrations including classical instruments such as cellos, flutes and trombones. Now it's 2005 and our third album "Aeolian" was just released by Metal Blade Records.
Who is the core of the band, if there is such?
Nils: There definitely is a core. The core consists of seven fix members who always are there. These are the people you'll always see on stage at our shows. The core is what you could call an expanded rock line-up: guitars, bass, drums, vocals, percussion and visuals. What makes The Ocean a collective is the other people loosely associated to the band, such as cello or violin players, a sound engineer, additional singers, graphic designers and even a juggler. They join us depending on our needs, their availability and logistic feasibility.
Who are the main song-writers?
Nils: All our songs – words and music -- are written by the "creative despot in charge", Robin. We're not a jam-band. A lot of us, including Robin, have played in jam bands and none of these bands ever really got anywhere. The Ocean follows a different approach. Robin composes all the music from scratch by himself: guitars, bass, drums, lyrics and the orchestral stuff. This was the concept from the beginning and one of the reasons why some people didn't stay in the band too long. They weren't used to that approach and didn't want to play in a band that doesn't offer space for realizing their egomaniac desires. It was hard to find musicians that didn't want to place their own solos in every song. But we found them: people who are into the idea of playing composed music rather than jamming around and being in a band with the idea of "the whole" in mind.
The musical is quite a blend of some different elements, how did it end up like that? Where is the inspiration for the music found?
Nils: We've always wanted to transcend the borders of the musical sandbox we grew up in. We don't want to confine ourselves to one particular style, but rather create our own by incorporating elements from more than just one genre. Most of us have a punk, metal, or hardcore background, but over the years we've discovered a huge variety of artists not only from contemporary metal and noise contexts, but from a larger horizon – even including artists that are not even musicians. Film makers such as Lynch or Tarkovsky, poets and writers such as Rimbaud or Lautreamont and surrealist artists like Breton and Dali: even those people have shaped our approach to music. As for what metal/noise/hardcore in the broadest sense is concerned, bands that have really had an impact on us are Unbroken, Groundwork, Absinthe, Coalesce, Converge, Botch, Dillinger Escape Plan, Neurosis, The Melvins, Refused, Meshuggah and more than anything, the mighty BREACH.
Can you pull out 3 bands and 3 songs that have meant a lot to you and for the sound of The Ocean?
Robin: The bands must be Breach, Neurosis and Unbroken. And the songs are 'Tannhäuser/Derivee' by Refused, 'The Saddest Day' by Converge and 'Future Breed Machine' by Meshuggah.
Which elements do you see as the most important ones for a The Ocean song?
Nils: Our songs don't follow a scheme or a recipe, so it's hard to point out three elements that are crucial for each of our songs. Our songs are just too different from each other. Just compare 'Necrobabes.com' and 'Austerity', or 'Dead Serious And Highly Professional' and 'Endusers'. I don't think there's even one element that they all have in common – except for the fact that they all have this certain The Ocean feel to them.
How would you describe your music to one, who never had heard about the band?
Nils: Our music is a bastard of things that usually are thought to exclude each other: it's empathetic but vile, it's technically perfect but highly emotional. Double-bass attacks are combined with electronic soundscapes, calm cello passages meet guitar-dominated outbursts of passion and fury.
How did you end up with the band name The Ocean, what does it symbolize?
Robin: The Ocean is the place where everything begins and ends. The ocean can stand for a peaceful sunset scenery as much as for a stirred-up, man-eating storm-sea, swallowing everything in its path. This is true just as much for our music: there are plenty of peaceful, playful, instrumental passages on our previous records "Fogdiver" and "Fluxion". As for what the present tense is concerned, I guess I'll have to say that the state of the ocean is a category-4 hurricane though... I have a very intimate, personal relationship to the sea, although I have never been living close to the coast. I have spent the most beautiful and the most frightening moments of my life close to the ocean, so it really has a deep meaning for me. I can sit by the ocean for hours and just look at the water, I can't get enough of it... it's an addiction, I guess...
You have just released your first full length album for Metal Blade "Aeolian", how has it so far been received?
Robin: The overall reactions have been outstanding. We got high scores from all over Europe, record of the month in Swedish Close-Up Magazine, 4K in Kerrang, etc... Although some people especially here in Germany don't follow and understand the "direction" we have taken with this new record. I put this in quotation marks because it is not a direction: "Aeolian" shows a face of the band that was always there, and people who have seen us live know that. But still, it's just one face out of several faces we out on. "Fluxion" shows another face, and "Fogdiver" yet another. This is a great challenge to us, to reinvent ourselves with every new album. But that doesn't mean that the old albums are falling from grace with us. We still love our mellow, instrumental "Fogdiver" tracks as much as the violent outbursts on "Aeolian". But some people can't take that, for them "Aeolian" is too much metal or for others "Fogdiver" is too artsy, or whatever. That's cool with us, we're not writing music to please the masses, and it's normal that you lose fans and gain new ones along the way.
How do you feel about the album?
Robin: "Aeolian" is a brutal fucking bastard of a record: there are no embellishments, fewer calm passages than in the past, there's no room to breathe for the listener, it's the full-on assault of the senses: technical yet highly emotional, empathetic yet vile. Song-lengths range between 1.30 and 10 minutes; there are a lot of weird time-signatures and seemingly chaotic arrangements, but the overall picture is really coherent I think... you don't get lost in the record, you'll always get the feeling, although it might take a while to absorb the whole thing and to remember the songs. It's definitely not an easy-listening record... it's was a challenge for us to make this record, and it is a challenge for the listener to receive it. To us it is a very special record, and the one we're most content with, from all the records we've done so far.
What do you expect from it?
Robin: That it fills our pockets as quick as possible so I can buy that Maserati anytime soon... no, seriously: We don't have too many expectations connected to that album, it is in many European territories the first The Ocean album ever released, many people are not yet familiar with us, because our previous records weren't widely available in many territories. I expect that we'll be able to tour now on a regular basis, also in all these "new" countries, and since our album is also being released in the US and in Japan, that we'll be able to tour over there hopefully soon, too. Let's just see what happens.
Which track on it is your favourite and which one does represent The Ocean the best?
Robin: Each one has its own meaning to me and its own special history, so it very hard to pick one. But if I had to, I would probably say... damn, I don't know. I can't pick one. I'll have to pick at least two. The first one would be the opener, 'The City In The Sea'. This song is our tribute to metal, in a way, it comprises a lot of different styles and aspects, all wrapped up in The Ocean-vesture, of course: there is the classical re-de-de-de-de-de-opening, followed by a chaotic fuck-your-brains-out-part, then the mid-tempo hardcore part with these bestial vocals followed by the essential sludge/doom-part, and then the infamous final chapter... the final chapter of this song is among the most intricate and crushing music we've ever written - and strangely enough, it is one of the few arrangements our drummer Torge and me have developed jamming, more or less. We met every day for about 10 days in a row, working on the arrangements. When we played it to the other guys in the band, they were like "fuck off, you crazy bastards!!"... It reminds me a bit of old Confessor - except for the vocals, obviously.
The second one would be 'Inertia'. It's one of my favourite songs ever. There's this almost Wagner-esque part in the middle of the song with all these cellos playing and building up tension and a breathtaking, ever-changing drum-pattern to top it off... it just builds and builds and then it totally explodes when the vocals come back in, before terminating in this agonizing tempo-curve breakdown at the end of the song... I also really dig the contrast at the beginning of the song between Tomas Hallbom's desperate, high vocals and Meta's low-end roars... you can also hear a surf-guitar in the first part of the song if you listen carefully...
What does the album title symbolize and what are your thoughts behind it… And what about the cover artwork, what does it symbolize and what are your thoughts behind it?
Robin: The title "Aeolian" refers to the force of the wind, to all processes of erosion, destruction, and shaping of the face of the earth through the power of winds. Obviously, this is also reflected in the album artwork. The title also has a relation to the title of our previous record, "Fluxion", which refers to all processes of erosion, destruction and shaping of the earth through forces of flowing liquids, especially water. So the album's theme is developed by references to the force of winds. To us, the wind is a symbol for and cause of discomfort. Not anguish or hatred, but plain, beautiful discomfort... the cold breeze that's blowing from the sea when the sun is about to set, the chafing crust of salt between your sun-tanned skin and your shirt, the biting stench of urine in a worn-down, beautifully colored colonial house entry, the pressing heat of a tropical night that doesn't let you sleep, the feeling of wet clothes sticking to your body while wading through flooded streets during heavy monsoon rains... for those are things we are hard-pressed to find in this clean, air-conditioned world of ours.
Let's turn towards the lyrical side of The Ocean, which lyrical themes have you touched on "Aeolian"?
Robin: The overall theme of the lyrics on the album is some of the nasty, hostile excrescences of a society based on commodities, wage-work, material success, individuality... and, increasingly, control. One of these implications is the necessity of leading outlined lives for the sake of career and affluence... we go to kindergarten, to school, to university, to work, and by the time we get out of the sweep through the institutions we're old and tired. We never actually pause and live life in the present tense, in a rewarding way, and a lot of times we don't even seem to know what is rewarding to us. Hence we are content with almost everything -- working shitty jobs doing things we don't enjoy in order to earn money to buy things we don't need.
Who is writing the lyrics and where is the inspiration for them found?
Robin: Inspiration is found almost everywhere, for the lyrics often deal with our every-day reception of the way this world is organized. But we also draw a great deal upon influences from other writers. Let me give you one example: on "Aeolian" there's a song called 'Une Saison En Enfer'. This is the title of a book by Rimbaud, a collection of poems and prose, and that title, as well as that book in general, perfectly represent what that song is about. I'm really into Rimbaud and the whole story of him and Verlaine, I'm actually even more interested in his life than in his artistic, poetic achievements, though they are undeniable. Rimbaud to me reflects an individual with a heart so passionate that in the end it turned out to be his tragic flaw. He lost his life at the age of 37 after completely turning his back on and even ridiculing his own artistic achievements and becoming a vagabond of sorts in Ethiopia. Before that, he was working for the Dutch army, deserted, fled, got banished, lived in Cyprus, Norway and Africa... though his days on earth were few, he lived life to the fullest and experienced more than most other people will in 60 or 70 years of life on earth. That was very inspirational for me and it also represents the spirit of THE OCEAN.
Do you have a message to tell with your lyrics and how important are the lyrics compared to the music?
Robin: The lyrics are indeed important, just like every instrument on this record, they're a contribution to the whole. What lyrics can do is open up entirely new horizons for someone who is really "investigating" a record. If you like the music, you might discover whole new aspects of it by reading the lyrics. They have the potential to make you appreciate it in a much deeper, all-encompassing way. But in a lot of cases they have the opposite effect, which particularly is the case with overtly political lyrics. Preachy, moralist lyrics might ruin the whole picture – there's moments when you think you'd better not have opened the booklet. Good political lyrics that don't come off as pretentious or cliché are very rare, almost non-existent. His Hero Is Gone is a positive example. It just seems to be an eternal contradiction of sorts, since politics address people on a rational level, whereas music and art address people on an emotional level. So if you try to mix that, either one of the two aspects will end up suffering. That's why we stick to a very personal, abstract approach, although there are political statements in almost every song. But they kind of need to be discovered, they are not so much "in your face"... people who make the effort to read the lyrics will find a lot in them – it's up to you if you call that a message or not.
You have been marketed as one of the bright hopes for the future of extreme metal, how do you feel about that?
Robin: That's nice to hear, although the term "hope" suggests some sort of incertitude... to put it like Belgium's No. 1 rock magazine, Rock Sound: "THE OCEAN ARE the future". That's better...
Is the above a statement that the band is capable of lifting?
Robin: Absolutely! Just give us 3 years and we'll have Slayer open up for us.
The band has been quite active in the past, is the pace you so far have had, a pace you'll keep up, or do you intend to slow a bit down?
Robin: Not really. Well, 2006 might be the first year in our band-history that won't see the release of a new The Ocean album, but a new record is already in the making. I'm spending many nights a week down in the catacombs of oceanland these days, writing and programming new material. I'm really excited to record this stuff, but the near future will see us tour a lot and I'm afraid we won't be able to start rehearsing the new material before fall 2006. Next time we go into the studio, we wanna take a different approach: we want to be able to play all the songs perfectly before we record them. That was not the case with the "Fluxion / Aeolian" recording session. But generally, the pace is gonna be even more up in the future. Hopefully we'll be able to tour many months a year in the coming years. We're trying to do this as full-time as possible.
How do you look upon the future of The Ocean?
Robin: Lots of touring. Lots of flying wood and broken noses. Lots of absinthe... and a new, devastating stage performance. We're gonna be embarking on a big European tour early next year (2006). The tour will begin on March 15th in Berlin and conclude on April 18th in Berlin, again. It will take us to Scandinavia for the first time, but also to Italy, Spain, Portugal, Benelux -- and France! We'll be down there in early April, supposedly. April 9th in Paris at Le Batofar!
Will you share your 5 all time favourite albums with our readers?
Nils: The musical preferences in the band are too diverse to do this for the band as a whole (actually there's a lot of artists/records that we're having heavy fights about), but I can list my own top five, which is nevertheless gonna include favorites shared by many others in the band. (In no particular order)
Refused – The Shape Of Punk To Come
Shellac – At Action Park
Damnation A.D. - No more Dreams Of Happy Ending
Breach – Venom
Squarepusher – Hard Normal Daddy
Robin:
Breach - Venom
Neurosis - Times Of Grace
Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve / Chaosphere
Converge - Petitioning The Empty Sky
Unbroken - Life. Love. Regret
Thanks a lot for answering my questions, if you have anything to add feel free to add it now!
Nils: If you liked "Aeolian", check out its symphonic twin, "Fluxion". It'll open up a slightly different view onto The Ocean, but you'll sure love it. For those who haven't bought "Aeolian" yet, there's a 3LP box set featuring both "Aeolian" and "Fluxion". And then there's two limited 7"s on Futhermocker Records and Garden Of Exile – the latter one is a split with Burst, another awesome band we highly recommend checking out. Check our website for details on all this. Thanks for the interview!
The Ocean website
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